David Yates + The Stand = Happening

Looks like we know what David Yate’s next big undertaking will be. Fables may be on the back burner as the Harry Potter director aims to bring a franchise of Stephen King’s The Stand movies to the big screen. With news from IGN it would appear that Yates and writer Steve Kloves are ready to commit to the project:

Fables Movie in the Works – David Yates to Direct?

So it’s no mystery that David Yates, the Director of the last four Harry Potter movies, is a hot commodity with nothing but directorial offers thrown at him. It’s already rumored that he may direct the Tom Hardy as Al Capone Biopic Cicero, but it’s also rumored that he has been looking real intently on adapting Stephen King’s The Stand into a franchise of movies. Now comes the movie that I think he was perhaps destined to make after Harry Potter… Fables.

For those of you not familiar with the story of Fables, it’s simple and kind of like Roger Rabbit. So, a whole bunch of fairy tale and folklore characters (Toons from Roger Rabbit) flee their home world and live amongst us in the real world in a secret portion of New York City called Fabletown (Toon Town, see? Just like Roger Rabbit.) These fables blend in with the rest of us in the real world and go about their day-to-day lives and some of the many stories revolve around murder mysteries and conspiracy thrillers, really a plethora of stories.

So of course if David Yates was able to make four movies about Wizards blending in with the modern world and living amongst us, then how great would he be at creating a movie involving fairytale and folklore characters mingling around New York? I think this would be his best project to take out of the three if he had to choose. (Fables, Cicero and the Stand.) I wasn’t a fan of Yates at the start of his Potter years, but after the two Deathly Hallows movies he showed me that he is a very talented filmmaker.

Now, hopefully we’ll see him bring the popular graphic novels of Fables to the big screen next!

‘The Stand’ Movie Coming Soon?

I don’t know why they have to make a Stand movie at all when the old six-hour mini series is so blatantly awesome. My favorite scene is when a ‘super flu’ infected guy confronts Gary Sinise’s character in a stairwell and says “come down and eat chicken with me beautiful, it’s so dark!” I laughed exceptionally hard, but it wasn’t over because Gary Sinise proceeds to kick him in the face area with a scream of rage. Effin’ classic.

Tom Hardy To Play Capone In ‘Cicero’

It seems like Al Capone is making quite a comeback these days. With the famous gangster known the world round as “Scarface” already featuring more and more prominently in the hit HBO show Boardwalk Empire, it would seem that Harry Potter director David Yates may be the next one to tackle him in the movie Cicero. And who to play the famous Alphonse Gabriel Capone? Well who better than Tom Hardy, fresh off his venom injected stint as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises?

According to IGN, the Inception alum, and soon to be Mad Max, will star in the biopic following Capone’s rise to power – and also his fall… into syphilis. Check it out from IGN below:

Dark Knight Rises actor Tom Hardy is reportedly going to play infamous Chicago mob boss Al Capone in Cicero, a biopic that Harry Potter helmer David Yates may direct.

Vulture has the scoop: “Hardy has attached himself to the project, which was originally written in the seventies as a TV pilot by Walon Green (the screenwriter of Sam Peckinpah’s masterpiece, The Wild Bunch) but is now being readapted as a film. And possibly more than one: There is talk that, like The Stand, it could be stretched out, with a first film only tracking the gangster up to his rise to the top of the Chicago criminal food chain; his reign and downfall would be in a subsequent film(s).”

I like the idea of any movie involving Al Capone, I can’t get enough of the character on Boardwalk Empire where he is played marvelously by Stephen Graham. But I do have some misgivings about subsequent movies about the guy unless they are some of the best crime-drama’s ever made. I’m thinking they would have to be Godfather caliber to merit two or even three movies about the life of Al Capone. But then again, Tom Hardy seems to have all the makings of an up and coming star to help make something like that happen. So hats off to whomever gets the directing job on Cicero and make it good! What do all of you fools think?

Does Tom Hardy have what it takes to follow in the footsteps of the great Robert Deniro in portraying Capone?